In a shift aimed at fostering wider use of encryption on the Web, Google is tweaking its search engine to favor sites that use HTTPS to protect end users' privacy and security.

and concludes

Companies devote huge amounts of resources to search engine optimization. Those that so far have ignored calls to implement HTTPS may finally heed them if they believe it will help their pages rise above those of their competitors in the all-important Google search rankings.

SEO is a big business, so I suspect there will be no bigger carrot offered to encrypt web traffic than Google's action to favor it.

I wonder if this is a major discussion point around the water cooler at government spy agencies today? I wonder to what extent this will affect security monitoring tools and services in the next 1-2 years?